I need to.”
Her eyes moved over the first line.
Then the second.
Her face changed slowly, not with one emotion but many arriving at once—confusion, disbelief, recognition, grief for something she had not known she had lost.
When she spoke, her voice was barely above a breath.
“It says… my mother’s name was Clara.”
The name seemed to settle over the library like a forgotten song.
Clara.
I looked back at the photograph.
The woman beside my father. Emma’s eyes. The child on her hip.
Emma kept reading.
“She worked for your father,” she said. “Not at the house. At a diner he owned before this. He says she was honest, brave, and stubborn enough to argue with him when he was wrong.”
A faint, broken laugh escaped her.
“That sounds like someone I would have liked.”
My chest tightened.
Emma had grown up in foster homes after losing
